Published in two volumes a decade apart (in 1605 and 1615), Don Quixote is the most influential work of literature to emerge from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon. As a founding work of modern Western literature, it regularly appears high on lists of the greatest works of fiction ever published.[1]

The mezzo-soprano (although she commonly sang soprano parts) Maria Malibran (March 24, 1808 – September 23, 1836), was one of the most famous opera singers of the 19th century. Malibran was known for her stormy personality and dramatic intensity, becoming a legendary figure after her death at age 28. Contemporary accounts of her voice describe its range, power and flexibility as extraordinary.

Malibran was born in Paris as María Felicia García Sitches into a famous Spanish musical family. Her father, Manuel García, was a celebrated tenor much admired by Rossini, having created the role of Count Almaviva in his The Barber of Seville. García was also a composer and an influential vocal instructor, and he was her first voice teacher. He was described as inflexible and tyrannical; the lessons he gave his daughter became constant quarrels between two powerful egos.

Cecilia Bartoli (Italian pronunciation: [tʃeˈtʃilja ˈbartoli]; born June 4, 1966 in Rome) is an Italian mezzo-soprano opera singer and recitalist. She is best-known for her interpretation of the music of Mozart and Rossini, as well as for her performances of lesser-known Baroque and classical music. She is known for having the versatility to play both soprano and mezzo roles, and is sometimes considered a soprano with a low tessitura. Bartoli’s coloratura skill has earned her the title the Queen of Agility.

Soundtrack

One of the more familiar tunes is the opening theme, taken from the folk ballad “The Green Leaves of Summer”, composed by Dimitri Tiomkin and Paul Francis Webster for the opening of John Wayne’s movie “The Alamo” (1960). As is usual for a Quentin Tarantino film, the music used in the film is eclectic, but mostly consisting of music in the spaghetti-western genre[72]. The soundtrack was released on August 18, 2009.

Tarantino originally wanted Ennio Morricone to compose the soundtrack for the film. Morricone refused, because of the sped-up production schedule of the film.[73] However, Tarantino did use several tracks by Morricone from previous films in the soundtrack.

Johann Sebastian Bach (German pronunciation: [joˈhan] or [ˈjoːhan seˈbastjan ˈbax]) (31 March 1685 [O.S. 21 March] – 28 July 1750) was a German composer and organist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity.[1] Although he introduced no new forms, he enriched the prevailing German style with a robust contrapuntal technique, an unrivalled control of harmonic and motivic organisation in composition for diverse instrumentation, and the adaptation of rhythms and textures from abroad, particularly Italy and France.

“I have always believed that opera is a planet where the muses work together, join hands and celebrate all the arts.” -Franco Zeffirelli

Shaoxing opera (or Yueju – simplified Chinese: 越剧; traditional Chinese: 越劇; pinyin: Yuèjù , Yue opera) is a relatively new local Chinese opera popular in the southern regions of the Yangtze River. It originated in Shengxian County (present Shengzhou City), in the Shaoxing region of northeastern Zhejiang Province, which belonged to the Yue State in ancient times, so it was popularly known as Yueju (越劇, Yue opera). Yue opera has a history of about 800 years. It was derived from a kind of story-singing. At first, it was performed with a small drum and hardwood clappers for rhythm and later, choral and orchestral accompaniment was added. It drew some musical elements from Shao opera and subsequently formed its own characteristics.

Yue opera is noted for its lyricism, and singing is dominant in it. Its tunes are sweet and beautiful and the performance vivid and full of local color. Originally Yue opera was only performed by males and then changed to all female performances. After 1949, male and females work together. Notable actors include Yin Guifang, Zhu Shuizhao, Yuan Xuefen, Wang Wenjuan, Xu Yulan, Fan Ruijuan, Fu Quanxiang, Lu Jinhua, Jin Caifeng, Lü Ruiying, Zhang Yunxia, Zhang Guifeng, and Xu Tianhong.

Origin of Aphrodite:
The origins of Aphrodite are unclear. Most references point to Aphrodite being born from the foam of the sea and the blood of Zeus’s father. Others say that Aphrodite is the daughter of Zeus and Dione. Whatever the origin, all the gods wanted Aphrodite as their wife, but Zeus gave her to Hephaestus because he would make a good, loving, solid husband.

Evgenia Obraztsova was born in St Petersburg. She graduated from the Vaganova Academy of Russian Ballet (class M. Vasilieva) and joined the Mariinsky Theatre in 2002. Coached by Ninel Kurgapkina she has made a big impression in the classical repertoire as well as in Balanchine and Forsythe works.

Repertoire includes:La Sylphide (Sylphide), The Sleeping Beauty (Fee Generosity), Raymonda (Variation), The Fountain of Bakhchisarai (dance with the bells), Don Quixote (Cupid), Le Corsaire (the three Odalisques), La Bayadere (Dance of the bayaderes, Shadows), Romeo and Juliet (Juliet), The Legend of Love (Shyrin), Forsythe’s In the middle somewhat elevated and The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, Chemiakin’s The Nutcracker (Masha) and The Magic Nut (Rat jester).

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

…………………………….
…………………………………………….
……………………
…………
…………………………………..
…

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine

The Decameron (subtitle: Prencipe Galeotto) is a collection of 100 novellas by Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio, probably begun in 1350 and finished in 1353. It is a medieval allegorical work best known for its bawdy tales of love, appearing in all its possibilities from the erotic to the tragic. Some believe many parts of the tales are indebted to the influence of The Book of Good Love from the Literary Circles of the Court of King Alfons X “the Wise”. Many notable writers such as Chaucer are said to have drawn inspiration from The Decameron .

The Decameron is structured in a frame narrative, or frame tale. Boccaccio begins with a description of the Black Death and a group of seven women and three men who flee from plague-ridden Florence to a villa in the (then) countryside of Fiesole for two weeks. To pass the time, each member of the party tells one story for each one of the nights spent at the villa. Although fourteen days pass, two days each week are set aside; one day for chores and one holy day during which no work is done. In this manner, 100 stories are told by the end of the two weeks.

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

……………………
………….
……………………………

Wystan Hugh Auden (21 February 1907 – 29 September 1973, pronounced /ˈwɪstən ˈhjuː ˈɔːdən/)[1] who signed his works W. H. Auden, was an Anglo-American poet, regarded by many as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.[2] His work is noted for its stylistic and technical achievements, its engagement with moral and political issues, and its variety of tone, form and content.[3][4] The central themes of his poetry are love, politics and citizenship, religion and morals, and the relationship between unique human beings and the anonymous, impersonal world of nature.

Miss Julie (Swedish: Fröken Julie) is a naturalistic play written in 1888 by August Strindberg dealing with class, love/lust, the battle of the sexes, and the interaction among them. Set on midsummer night of 1894 on the estate of a Count in Sweden, the young woman of the title, attempting to escape an existence cramped by social mores and have a little fun, dances at the servants‘ annual midsummer party, where she is drawn to a senior servant, a footman named Jean, who is particularly well-traveled, well-mannered and well-read. The action takes place in the kitchen of Miss Julie’s father’s manor; here Jean’s fiancée, a servant named Kristin, cooks and sometimes sleeps while Jean and Miss Julie talk.

Miss Julie: Daughter of the count who owns the estate. She is strong-willed. Raised by her late mother to “think like and act like a man”, she is a confused individual. She is aware of the power she holds, but switches between being above the servants and flirting with Jean. She longs to fall from her pillar.

Jean: Manservant to the count. When he was a child, he had seen Miss Julie many times at a distance and thought of her. He left the town and traveled widely, working many different jobs as he went, before finally returning to work for the count. He has aspirations to rise from his station in life and manage his own hotel, with Miss Julie being part of his plan. He is alternately kind and callous. Despite his aspirations, he is rendered servile by the mere sight of the count’s gloves and boots.

Photography (IPA: [fә’tɒgrәfi] or IPA: [fә’tɑːgrәfi][1]) (from Greek φωτο and γραφία) is the process, activity and art of creating still or moving pictures by recording radiation on a sensitive medium, such as a film, or an electronic sensor. Light patterns reflected or emitted from objects activate a sensitive chemical or electronic sensor during a timed exposure, usually through a photographic lens in a device known as a camera that also stores the resulting information chemically or electronically. Photography has many uses for business, science, art and pleasure.

The word “photography” comes from the Greekφώς (phos) “light” + γραφίς (graphis) “stylus”, “paintbrush” or γραφή (graphê) “representation by means of lines” or “drawing”, together meaning “drawing with light.” Traditionally, the products of photography have been called negatives and photographs, commonly shortened to photos.

The discipline of making lighting and camera choices when recording photographic images for the cinema is dealt with under Cinematography

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high – piled books, in charact’ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen’d grain;
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And feel that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink

“The tragedy of it is that nobody sees the look of desperation on my face. Thousands and thousands of us, and we’re passing one another without a look of recognition.” -Henry Miller

Henry Valentine Miller (December 26, 1891 – June 7, 1980) was an Americannovelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of “novel” that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is distinctly always about and expressive of the real-life Henry Miller and yet is also fictional. His most characteristic works of this kind are Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, and Black Spring. He also wrote travel memoirs and essays of literary criticism and analysis.

“The whole idea of changing the future has been brought up before, but this time instead of changing the future by altering the past it brings new perspective by altering the present by adding new info from the future”

“Oh yeah, initially I was thinking this would be my “Dollars Trilogy“. I was going to do a new one every ten years. But I need at least fifteen years before I do this again.I’ve already got the whole mythology: Sofie Fatale will get all of Bill’s money. She’ll raise Nikki, who’ll take on The Bride. Nikki deserves her revenge every bit as much as The Bride deserved hers. I might even shoot a couple of scenes for it now so I can get the actresses while they’re this age.”-Quentin Tarantino

Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy written early in the career of William Shakespeare about two teenage “star-cross’d lovers“[1] whose untimely deaths ultimately unite their feuding families. It was among Shakespeare’s most popular plays during his lifetime and, along with Hamlet, is one of his most frequently performed plays.

I dreamed as in my bed I lay,
All night’s fathomless wisdom come,
That I had shorn my locks away
And laid them on Love’s lettered tomb:
But something bore them out of sight
In a great tumult of the air,
And after nailed upon the night
Berenice’s burning hair.

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow–
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand–
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep–while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Bellow’s novels investigate isolation, spiritual dissociation, and the possibilities of human awakening[citation needed]. Bellow drew inspiration from Chicago, his hometown, and he set much of his fiction there. His works exhibit a mix of high and low culture, and his fictional characters are also a potent mix of intellectual dreamers and street-smart confidence men. His best known novels are The Adventures of Augie March, Herzog, and Humboldt’s Gift.

“The imagination is the spur of delights… all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?”-D.A.F de Sade

Plot outline

The plot is taken from two chapters in Cervantes’ novel of the same name. It concerns the unsuccessful attempt by the rich and foppish Gamache (Camacho in Cervantes’s novel) to marry the beautiful Kitri (known as Quiteria in the novel), who in turn is in love with Basil (or Basilio), a young barber from her village. Kitri wants to marry Basil, but her father desires that she wed the much older Gamache. Kitri and Basil hatch a plan; he pretends to commit suicide by supposedly stabbing himself at the wedding ceremony. His “dying” wish is that Kitri marry him, thus presumably leaving Gamache free to marry her after Basilio’s “death”. Of course, after the ceremony is performed, Basil miraculously “revives”, and Gamache can do nothing except watch the two lovers happily go off. Don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza are only marginally involved in the storyline, although Quixote mistakes Kitri for Dulcinea, and his famous attack on the windmills (from an earlier chapter in the novel) is shoehorned into the main plot.

“Illustrious acts high raptures do infuse, And every conqueror creates a muse.“-Edmund Waller

Analysis

Today Don Quixote is considered one of the most joyous and festive of the classical ballets, brimming with spectacular virtuoso dancing. At the same time this abundance of dancing is well organised, showing a clear choreographic and dramatic vision (particularly in the Kirov version).

A short prologue based on mime action is followed by an act called A Square in Barcelona, in which classical choreography imitating the “Spanish Style” is predominant, with a sprinkling of character dances.

The second act, The Gypsy Camp, comes as a sharp contrast- here pantomime and characters dancing reign supreme (although some 15 years ago this scene also contained a lyrical pas de deux for the two main characters).

The next act, Dulcinea’s Garden, is a purely classical one in which only female dancers appear. This is followed by A Tavern in Seville; once again, there is plenty of character dancing and acting- and traditionally, even the ballerina wears heeled shoes in the scene.

The final wedding celebration is an extended classical grand pas with the now famous pas de deux of the main characters.

The characters of the ballet do much more than just perform their numerous variations, however; they express their thoughts and emotions through dancing, and each character has his or her own idiosyncrasies which are expressed in the choreography itself.

Don Quixote is also distinguished by what can be called its democratic spirit: the only “noble cavalier” in the ballet is Gamache, and he is the butt of everyone’s jokes and tricks. Don Quixote himself is treated with an increasing irony, friendly though it may be. By contrast, Kitri and Basilio are heroes of the people; they belong to the crowd and the crowd interferes in their lives without any second thoughts.

That crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,
Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, ‘O sea-starved, hungry sea.

“I hated the self created in her by others. Others feel because of her; and because of her, others write poetry; because of her, others hate; others, like Henry, love her in spite of themselves.”-Anais Nin

June met Henry Miller in 1923 when she worked as a taxi dancer on broadway in New York and Miller was employed as personnel manager of Western Union. After Miller divorced his first wife, Beatrice Wickens, a pianist and piano teacher, he married June, in 1924, and left his job to devote himself fully to writing, while June developed various schemes to support them. In 1928, the Millers embarked on a lengthy tour of Europe, which included France, Austria, Hungary and Germany.

Who gave thee, O Beauty!
The keys of this breast,Too credulous lover
Of blest and unblest?
Say when in lapsed ages
Thee knew I of old;
Or what was the service
For which I was sold?
When first my eyes saw thee,
I found me thy thrall,
By magical drawings,
Sweet tyrant of all!

I drank at thy fountain
False waters of thirst;
Thou intimate stranger,
Thou latest and first!
Thy dangerous glances
Make women of men;
New-born we are melting
Into nature again.
Lavish, lavish promiser,
Nigh persuading gods to err,
Guest of million painted forms
Which in turn thy glory warms,
The frailest leaf, the mossy bark,
The acorn’s cup, the raindrop’s arc,
The swinging spider’s silver line,
The ruby of the drop of wine,
The shining pebble of the pond,
Thou inscribest with a bond
In thy momentary play
Would bankrupt Nature to repay.

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cozy parlor, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamor
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

‘O for a Muse of fire,that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
Akingdom for a stage,princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!”-William Shakespeare

In Greek mythology, the Muses (Ancient Greekαἱ μοῦσαι, hai moũsai[1]: perhaps from the Proto-Indo-European root *men- “think”[2]) are a sisterhood of goddesses or spirits, their number set at nine by Classical times, who embody the arts and inspire the creation process with their graces through remembered and improvised song and stage, writing, traditional music, and dance.